When you’re doing web design, it’s always tempting to design for the most up-to-date browsers, but you have to remember that not everybody runs them. You can’t leave those folks behind. On the flip side, however, some folks are running browsers that are so out-of-date that to support them fully would mean crippling your website and leaving out a lot of modern functionality. So, there’s always a tradeoff!

We always try to make things as inclusive as possible. For example, our ad code is one of the few in the world that can gracefully degrade and display ads even to people who have JavaScript turned off. Recently, we added Ajax functionality to our bidding pages, which allows you to bid up and down in real time. Of course, if you’re not running JavaScript, these won’t work, but they fail gracefully: they direct you to a page explaining what JavaScript is and how to turn it on. And, as before, you can always use the simple “edit bid” page.

For something more modern like Ajax, you’ve pretty much always got to ensure that there’s a non-Ajax way of doing things. In other words, shiny new interface elements for those who can handle them, while everyone has the option of staying with the tried and true.

We also updated our bid status icons. Older versions of Internet Explorer had long-standing bugs in which alpha blending (the transparent parts of images!) would not be rendered properly: instead of “seeing through” the image, you’d see an ugly shade of gray. It wasn’t very pretty. As such, our status icons were in GIF format, which rendered properly everywhere but which were limited to 256 colours. With IE support of PNG images now working properly for a while, we’ve upgraded our images to PNG format, and tidied them up a bit while we’re at it.

Before (GIF format):

After (PNG format):

You’ll notice the new images have a much smoother border, with none of the “jaggies” associated with the GIF format. This is an example of the trade-offs mentioned earlier: members using old versions of Internet Explorer will still see grey backgrounds on these images, but these members are in a much smaller minority now, and the majority of members can now enjoy a prettier Project Wonderful.

(Any resemblance between the old “NSF” image on the right and Pickle Inspector from the critically-acclaimed comic MS Paint Adventures are entirely coincidental.)

One of the major changes we’ve made to the bidding page (although it appears relatively minor on the page itself) is how bids end. Before when choosing an expiry date for your bid, you’d just click on the appropriate link, and a calendar showing the current month would pop up. You’d flip through to the month you wanted (assuming, of course, if you want the bid to expire on a day in the current month), choose a date and time, and you’d be good to go. It looked like this:

and when you’d click on that yellow “ending” text, you’d get something link this:

Pretty simple, right? We thought so too, until we discovered this one interface element caused a small market drop 12 times a year.

The issue is that most bidders don’t really care when their bid ends. Some do, of course (which is why it’s great to have this feature), but we discovered that when most bidders would choose an expiry date, they’d use approximates, saying things like “I want this bid to last about 2 weeks” and select a date appropriately. So far so good. But rather than always choosing a day about 14 days away, the date bidders would choose was being influenced by the interface.

Let’s say it’s the 15th of March. Our bidder, wanting his or her bid to last about two weeks, would most likely click on the last day of the month, the 31st, since that’s pretty close to his or her goal of two weeks. One thing they wouldn’t do was click on the calendar once to move it ahead to April, and click again to select April 1st. Selecting March 31st instead of April 1st saves our bidder two clicks, and the two dates are both close enough to being two weeks away from the 15th that it’s not really worth the hassle.

You may see where we’re going with this!

Now let’s say it’s the 16th of the month, and we’re in the same scenario. Our bidder is again most likely to select March 31st, since it saves time and clicks, and while it’s not as close to two weeks away as it was on the 15th, it’s still a pretty good fit. And as days go by, this bidder keeps selecting the 31st of March as their “two weeks away” point until we’re so close to it that it’s not a reasonable approximation of “two weeks away” anymore. At this point the bidder either thinks “Ah well, one week is enough” and again selects March 31st, or they bite the bullet and click twice more to select a later date in April.

The result of this was that we would see a spike in expiring bids at the end of every month. This was less than ideal for publishers, because at the end of every month all these bids would disappear en masse, and bid prices would drop across the board. Of course, that meant prices were cheaper for advertisers, but as we’ve seen recently in the world economy, a stable market is often preferable to one with drastic changes in it, even if this volatility is somewhat predictable. It would usually take a day or two to push prices up to where they’d been before the month ended.

Our new interface is similar, with an important difference: if you want to enter in an expiry date (and you don’t have to), you now have two ways of expressing this. The first (and default) way is to select the number of days (or weeks, or months, or years) that you want your bid to last. The second option is the one we discussed, with the pop-up calendar that allows you to choose a particular day. It looks like this:

What this new interface does that the old one didn’t is make the desire for efficiency we all share (some might call this “laziness”, but I disagree!) into a positive thing. If you’re there thinking, “I want this bid to last two weeks, and I don’t particularly feel like looking at a calendar to figure out what day that actually is”, this allows you to enter in the most important information (the length of your bid) without having to transform it to a date. The result is that bid expiries are no longer clumped around the end of the month, but happen throughout it instead. This means is a more stable and consistant market, which is good for everyone!

It goes to show you the importance of interfaces: even small things like this can have larger effects on the system as a whole. Normally improvements to our pages like this one are made without this sort of post to go with it, but it was really interesting for us to discover what was going on, why, and to redesign (and test, and redesign, and test, and redesign) the page appropriately. I hope you found it as interesting as we did!

We’ve just rolled out a ton of new features to make Project Wonderful easier and more useful for you, our beloved members! Here’s a short list of the highlights:

• Ad box categories: Every ad box now belongs to a category, like “Webcomics”, “Handmade”, or “Games and Gaming”. These allow advertisers to find your site easily, and makes targeting vertical niches a snap. As a publisher, you can use tags to further categorize your site!  As an advertiser, these categories allow you to target your advertising like never before.  Want to advertise only on webcomic sites?  Sure!  How about humour and music sites that get over an average of over 10000 hits a day and are bidding below $5 a day right now?  NO PROBLEM.The tags assigned to an ad box still exist, but are now mainly used for subcategorization. For example, in the past, if you wanted to find comic sites, you’d have to enter a tag search with tags like “comic comics webcomic webcomics”, and you’d still miss some. Now you can just search the category webcomics, and use tags for themes, like “action”, or “comedy”. The future is now, my friends!
• A simplified search page: You can actually do more (like finding sites that don’t have certain tags), but the interface has been made simpler and much more intuitive. Options you’re not using are tucked away, but can still be found with a single click.
• A revamped bidding page: It’s now easier than ever to bid, and your bids can last indefinitely. And rather than having to choose a set end time, you can now also enter in the number of days you want your bid to last.  Simplification!

There are various other interface improvements made throughout the site, including the pages used to modify your ad boxes and campaigns, which have been simplified and clarified.  We’ve got other improvements planned throughout the year.  It should be a good one!

Thanks for being Project Wonderful members.

We’ve updated our help pages recently: gone is the open-source phpMyFAQ and replacing it is some homegrown software more suited to our needs.  Nothing against phpMyFAQ, as it is a solid piece of software, but it was never a perfect fit: our new software is perfectly integrated with the rest of our site and set up more like a book you can browse, with some wiki-like features added in.

Questions are organized into categories, which are themselves organized, so you can see the context of each article you’re reading, and also see related articles on the same theme. Of course you can search for articles as well, but this new help system should make finding the information you want easier, while also making the system less daunting to new members!

Behind the scenes, there’s some exciting management features, like recording the most common search terms people use that don’t result in an exact match: this way we can see what we’re missing that people want, and add it into the database!

You can check out the new help system here. We’re adding new articles to it all the time, and one of the most popular new articles is the one titled Which sites can I put Project Wonderful ads on?, which explains our publisher standards in some detail. If you’re thinking of applying to become a Project Wonderful publisher, it’s worth checking out!

Whoah, it’s been a while since the last post!  My apologies.

We’ve got a few new features up: new interactive charts and chart types, as well as an upgrade to our ad code.

The charts you’ve probably noticed: they’re what’s shown when you’re examining the performance of an ad box (or a bid, or an ad, or a campaign!).  They used to be static images – and still are, if you don’t have Flash installed – but if you do, they’ve been replaced with more interactive charts that let you get exact values for every data point.  Neat!

We’ve also added comparative charts, which let you plot the performance of, say, three bids on the same charts, so you can see at a glance how they’re performaning against each other. We’ve set up a page here, which walks you through how these new charts work. Enjoy!

The second new feature is a revamped version of our copy-and-paste code. This new code is simpler to install, but otherwise has all the same features. You can get it by going to “My ad boxes” and clicking on “Get code”. You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to, of course!

Why did we change our code? There’s a few reasons. The main one was that some platforms (Blogger and Wordpress, specifically) would try to get too helpful and would accidentally modify our code so that it wouldn’t work. This was not so good! Our new code is more compact and simpler, which means that it takes up less space on your website, and there’s less places where it can be modified. It’s also prettier to look at.

The new code also gives you the option of whether or not you want your ads to display to people who have disabled JavaScript: having it on means more people seeing your ad, but also larger code on your page. Most other networks don’t offer non-JavaScript ad displays, but we recommend it!

So that’s what’s new! Expect to see more frequent posts here in the future, and thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful.

We’ll be rolling out a new update on Wednesday with two major changes. First off, after you log in the welcome page will display stats about your ad boxes and bids. Secondly, we’ll be limiting you to a maximum to 20 tags for describing your site’s contents.

The welcome page change is part of the usability enhancement program that we’re developing to improve our member’s experience and make frequently used features more accessible. When you log in to your account, if you have active bids or active ad boxes, then the welcome page will change from the default “how to use the service” message to a display that gives you up to date information on performance and other stats.

Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

On the tags side of thing, we noticed that while the vast majority of our members had less than 20 tags describing their sites, there was a small minority of ad boxes that had hundreds of tags! While we get wanting to ensure maximum exposure for your site, having hundreds of tags to describe the content is functionally equivalent to having no tags at all. If you have 500 tags, then the fact that one of them says “recipes” doesn’t really give me any information about the content of your site. The consequence is a race to the bottom where advertisers end up losing trust in the tagging system and going back to checking site content by hand, which is bad for everyone.

Starting Wednesday, we will limit sites to 20 tags. If you are currently over the limit, we’ve automatically selected 20 from the list you had, though we recommend checking with our choices and readjusting them to better reflect the content of your site. We hope that this move will help clean up the tag namespace and ensure better accuracy in searches as well as encouraging our publishers to be more focused on their core topics.

-Tim

We’ve added a new feature for our advanced members who want to use the same ad on multiple pages with different colour schemes. If you log in to your account and take a look at your ad box code, you’ll notice a few new lines of code and many lines of comments explaining how to use them.

Look for the lines: foregroundColor=''; and backgroundColor='';

If you edit these with the hexadecimal that you want for your foreground and background colours (i.e. backgroundColor='ff0000'; for a bright red), they will override the settings that you set in the ad box properties on our site.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t worry! Cutting and pasting in the code that we generate will still work just fine.

-Tim

This is the official Project Wonderful blog.

We’ll be using it to announce features, discuss tips and tricks for using the service and generally try to keep on top of all things Wonderful.

I’d like to start with the new features that we rolled out on the 12th.

First off are the new 300×250 rectangular ads. Quite a few publishers requested this size and we’re happy to oblige! They look like this:

With the new rectangles, we’re now offering 7 different formats for your ads and ad boxes (you can see them all here).

The other thing we’ve added is the ability to suspend your ad boxes. Say you want to take your site offline for some maintenance, you can deactivate your ad box, which will suspend all bids on it. When you reactivate the box, any bids that haven’t expired will reappear. These options are available under “My ad boxes” -> “Edit ad box”. This allows you to signal to us that your site will be down for a while. We won’t send our robot back until you’ve reactivated your ad box!

Our robot will still be diligently checking on all publisher sites to make sure that the ads are displaying properly. If a site goes down unexpectedly, or a publisher forgets to suspend the box, then the robot will suspend bidding as normal.

Email us at service@projectwonderful.com if you have any questions!

–Tim